Dead Cat Bounce: Caged Heat

The first in Dead Cat Bounce's set of "mock n roll" songs displays the same talent for clever and quirky musical one-liners that made Flight of the Conchords so popular – it's just a shame they don't carry on that way.

'The Weeping of the Willows' pulls Kenneth Grahame's characters out of their Victorian rural idyll and drops them into a dystopian industrial future where Ratty is an oppressed factory worker, Mole is a prostitute and Mr Toad commits suicide a la Kurt Cobain. Played in thrash metal style, it makes for an inventive and brilliantly incongruous opener, but the rest of the set is mediocre in comparison.

Most of the rest of the songs, like 'Rugby'—which riffs on the sport's homoerotic undertones—and 'Firemen'—playing on hoes/hose—stretch one moderately funny joke over the course of three or four minutes. It's mildly amusing for the first few songs, but it gets increasingly tedious as the set stretches on. The humour is at times insular: you can see how it would have been funny to the four lads in the hothouse environment of the recording studio, but it doesn't seem to quite work when let out into the wider world.

A piss-take though it may have been, the last song, a plea for the audience to buy the band's CD, again gives the impression that the men from Dublin don't yet have the material to match their potential.